Pegasus Document Releases 001 to 005

Seeing as ATS has begun releasing Sgt Clifford Stone's collection of FOIA documents... it seems like a perfect time to toss some of the ones collected by associates of Pegasus Research Consortium while researching the various topics John Lear, myself and others cover in the various threads...

I have over a thousand collected already. These are all publicly available from various government organizations. I am going to store the files on my server (well until I see problems with bandwidth :P)

The reason for this is that several times in the past I have linked people directly to a pertinent document only to have it pulled, most likely due to the number of hits they received to a paper that would have normally remained obscure.

This paper deals with an offshoot technology of the Tandem Mirror Fusion Project from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory... (see the thread for the background work)

Found by: NJ Mooch
Title: Propulsion Research on the Variable Isp Tandem Mirror Plasma Rocket
Date of Report: Feb 7, 1994
Source: MIT

This report describes the progress made in the past two years as well as the overall picture of this research. In the past years Several milestones have been achieved towards the realization of a practical space plasma thruster from the tandem mirror rocket experiment, i.e- the specific impulse, thrust, energy conversion efficiency, and mass flow-rate have been determined. The experiment operates at 9.4 kW of input power at an rf-to-plasma efficiency of 68%; The ion temperature is 172 eV ( 2,000,000 K ) which gives an I., of 12,852 s. The thrust is 76 mN (milli Newton) which is a high value for a low input power (9.4 kW) and very high I., ( 12,852 s ). The radiation loss was found to be very low. Most important, these results fall within our prediction.

A key advantage of this propulsion system is its high energy density that can be contained in the plasma. A flight system design and analysis has shown that the present experimental device can handle a power level in excess of 10 MW, resulting in specific weights as low as 0.04 kg/kW. The overall specific weight of a space vehicle for a piloted Mars mission, including nuclear power and power conditioning equipment, is only 8 kg/kW. This is a conservative
value which can be further reduced to 6 kg/kW.

A\ 150 day trip to Mars ( 180 day round trip including 90 days stay over ) can be achieved with only 10 MW\ of power. The trip time has been optimized by varying the I., and thrust to meet a required returned mass of 57.000 kg. In that study an efficiency of only 50% was assumed. Except for nuclear power, the technology involved is state-of-the-art with very minimal engineering scaling. In addition, substantial advancements in high temperature superconductors, solid state transmitters and power conditioning equipment are expected. Such development makes this device a most competitive electric propulsion approach when it is fully developed. The concept can be demonstrated near-term as gauged on our rapid. limited resource progress.